Why is it impossible to use the Speech Recorder on the Android emulator?

Question

I am trying to run the Speech Recorder that comes with the Android 2.2 emulator. The problem is that the moment I click the "Record" button:

It aborts with an error message "The application Speech Recorder (process com.android.speechrecorder) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again."

The problem is that trying again doesn't help.

Now, I searched StackOverflow and I combed the entire Internet and I found many reports of the same problem, without any working solution.

My conclusion is that, for some strange reason, the Android emulator is capable of using the Windows audio device for output, but not for input.

Why is that?

I know that other virtualization software (e.g. VMWare) have no problem using both output and input sections of the host's audio device.

Also, if Speech Recorder never worked for the emulator for anyone, why put it there?

Surely this has worked for someone. Is there a way to make Speech Recorder work for me, too?

I am using Windows XP 32-bit and my AVD is defined with an SD card (mounted upon start).

Update: I followed the suggestion by @Klaus to try and see whether any exceptions are thrown. I did so by simply typing ddms.bat at the command line to launch a stand-alone version of DDMS (with a logcat display at the bottom). Sure enough, I receive the following exception upon clicking the "Record" button:

03-29 14:16:58.195: ERROR/AudioRecord(303): Could not get audio input for record source 1
03-29 14:16:58.195: ERROR/srec_jni(303): initCheck error -22 
03-29 14:16:58.205: DEBUG/SpeechRecorderActivity(303): run audio capture thread
03-29 14:16:58.205: WARN/dalvikvm(303): threadid=8: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x4001d800)
03-29 14:16:58.215: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(303): FATAL EXCEPTION: Thread-9
03-29 14:16:58.215: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(303): java.lang.NullPointerException
03-29 14:16:58.215: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(303):     at com.android.speechrecorder.SpeechRecorderActivity$4.run(SpeechRecorderActivity.java:192)
03-29 14:16:58.285: WARN/ActivityManager(59):   Force finishing activity com.android.speechrecorder/.SpeechRecorderActivity
03-29 14:16:58.904: DEBUG/dalvikvm(59): GC_FOR_MALLOC freed 13324 objects / 656184 bytes in 197ms
03-29 14:16:59.915: INFO/ARMAssembler(59): generated scanline__00000077:03515104_00000000_00000000 [ 33 ipp] (47 ins) at [0x20db68:0x20dc24] in 1247352 ns
03-29 14:17:05.251: DEBUG/SpeechRecorderActivity(303): stopRecording

How do I proceed from here? I didn't write the Speech Recorder app, so I don't know what causes the NullPointerException at SpeechRecorderActivity.java line 192. I believe this has something to do with an earlier logcat message:

Could not get audio input for record source 1

But the question again is why?

Why wasn't it able to "get audio input for record source 1"?

Answer 1

The reason you're having this issue is that the emulator doesn't have an audioInput to hook. Your best bet is to plug a real device in and do testing there.